Posts Tagged "North America"

For decades, steam billowing from the twin cooling towers of We Energies’ coal-fired power plant in Pleasant Prairie has been a familiar landmark for motorists driving along I-94 near in Kenosha County. Milwaukee-based WEC Energy Group announced it was closing...

In 2005, coal made up 70 percent of AEP’s generation capacity — which is how the utility measures its electricity mix today. Since then, coal’s share of capacity has dropped to 47 percent. At the same time, AEP’s natural gas capacity increased from 19 percent in...

“It’s purely economic. The plant guys tried everything they could to keep it open, but it was a money loser. In a competitive market, you’ve got to take these steps. This is a coal plant operating in a market that’s flooded with cheap natural gas.”

– Allan Koenig, a spokesman for parent company of Luminant, owner of one of Texas’ largest coal plants that is being shut down

As EPA Chief Scott Pruitt prepares to roll back the Clean Power Plan, a new analysis challenges his assumptions about “winners and losers.” The roll back makes good on Trump’s campaign promise to do away with restrictions on the coal industry. But even a drastic...

Coal-fired power plants employ more people than mines, and they’re shutting down all over the country. Cheap natural gas, the rise of renewables backed by tax credits, and subsidies for nuclear energy will likely combine to keep the trend going. Coal-fired plants...

Retail giant Target has agreed to buy 100 megawatts of output from an wind project in Kansas. Under the agreement, power from the 474-MW Solomon Forks wind farm will help offset the energy used at 150 Target stores in the area. Construction on the wind project is...

The Orlando, Fla., city commission unanimously approved a resolution establishing a goal to transition Orlando to 100 percent clean and renewable energy by 2050. According to the Sierra Club, Orlando is now the largest city in Florida to make such a commitment and...

In an effort to better align solar-energy production with peak demand, the utility in Columbia, Missouri has begun to pay higher rebates for new west-facing arrays than it does for those facing south, where the sun’s most steady rays come from. The city-owned...

During a conference call with industry analysts last week, rail carrier CSX’s new president said he thinks “fossil fuels are dead” and announced that the company will not buy any more locomotives for coal trains. Hunter Harrison stressed that he doesn’t...

The U.S. government has awarded $4.6 million in aid to the state of Montana to retrain hundreds of coal workers, many of whom will soon be out of jobs because of a partial closure of the coal-fired Colstrip power plant, the second biggest in the West. Despite efforts...

“While it appears $4.5 billion is a big number, if you built a central-station generation facility like a coal unit or something like that, it would be as big or bigger, but much more risky.”

“If Duke and Southern Co. couldn’t do it, who is the Navajo Nation going to find who can do it? There’s no evidence that this can be done economically or reliably.”

– David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, reacting to statements by Navajo tribal officials that they are considering building a coal gasification plant on the site of Navajo Generating Station after it is decommissioned in 2019.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System is almost entirely out of coal, according to an update on its compliance with a 2015 law that compelled it and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System to divest from coal by July 1, 2017. Coal stocks were a...

“The only thing different between this year and previous years is that our political leaders, their lobbyist friends, and the billionaire coal tycoons are cutting safety regulations in order to make an additional dollar.”

– Gary Bentley, a former underground coal miner from Eastern Kentucky, writing about the rise in work-related coal mine deaths this year, even as the number of workers and mine output shrink. Nationally, there have already been more deaths in the first half of 2017 than in the entire previous year.

Throughout Vermont, customers are benefitting from an array of renewable, efficiency and energy storage projects that are being championed by an unlikely hero: the utility that supplies power to Vermont homes and businesses. Green Mountain Power is reinventing...

After working nine years to expand a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, its developers are pulling out of the $14 billion reactor project in the wake of rising costs, falling demand for energy, construction delays and the bankruptcy of lead contractor...

As the owners of the largest coal-burning power plant in the West map out the details of closing in the next two years, the Navajo Nation has taken its next step in its energy development by starting operations at a new 27-megawatt solar farm not far from the source...

“In the first year alone, the [Pueblo County School] District saved $35,000. Over the life of the [community solar] program, those savings will exceed $2 million. That’s enough to buy a Chromebook for 7 out of ten kids in the District. It’s enough to pay all 32 employees at Prairie Winds Elementary for a year.”

– U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., in an op-ed extolling the virtues of community solar programs. Bennet has introduced legislation in Congress to make permanent a Department of Energy program to promote community solar, especially in low-income communities.

Trying to keep aging coal and nuclear plants operating “may end up raising rather than lowering the average cost of wholesale electricity for many customers.”

– from a leaked draft of a politically motivated analysis commissioned by Energy Secretary Rick Perry that was supposed to question whether renewable energy policies or regulations have harmed grid reliability and accelerated the retirement of coal and nuclear plants, but which actually showed the opposite to be true.

Increasingly, utilities are shunning the power-purchase agreement model of acquiring new renewable energy capacity and instead making the leap to outright ownership, which allows the companies to build purchase costs directly into their rate base and earn guaranteed...

“Solar reduces the cost of home ownership, it makes houses sell faster, it returns more to a builder, it makes local jobs, and most importantly, it reduces carbon emissions today to help our children and grandchildren have a better future tomorrow.”

— South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard, whose monthly electric bill is about $10, after the city passed a measure requiring new houses to install solar panels.

“Donald Trump has used the phrase ‘clean coal’ probably a thousand times, and it doesn’t exist in the real world right now.”

At the same time Mississippi Power is still stinging from the failure of its $7.5 billion coal gasification and carbon capture project, the utility also has cut the ribbon on a $7 million solar facility at the Naval Construction Battalion Center. The project is...

Despite high air conditioning use and demand for electricity, California nonetheless survived its worst heat wave in 11 years without any major blackouts and with megawatts to spare. Billions of dollars in new power plants and an explosion in solar and wind farms made...

Dozens of power industry executives who flew to Washington for meetings told EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt that they are against the administration simply rescinding the Clean Power Plan. Rather, they said they’d like to see EPA draft a less stringent carbon...

“None of our people are ever going to be building a coal plant again. It’s devoid of reality.”

– an unidentified utility executive reacting to meetings between power sector leaders and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt about the future of the Clean Power Plan and utilities’ desire to see some sort of carbon regulation rather than having the Trump Administration simply erase the CPP.